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I'm a huge fan of PDFs now that I can create them so easily under Windows and OS X.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Making PDFs in Windows and OS X; 3rd macro app for OS X


June 30, 2002


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2002, The Post-Standard

   When I reviewed keyboard macro programs recently, I inadvertently left out a good one. This week I'll make up for that slipup -- I actually have no excuse for the omission, but maybe I can just claim that I'm getting old -- and I'll tell you about other new programs for Windows and Apple's OS X.
   The macro program I left out is an outstanding example of a well designed OS X application. OS X ("Operating System 10") is Apple's stunning new system software, totally different from its older operating system. (OS X is so different that I usually don't even refer to it as a "Macintosh" operating system, because most people think of the Mac as the old Apple computer.)
   The macro program is HotApp, from www.trufsoft.com. It's very easy to install (it does all the installation work for you, something many programs still don't do on OS X) and is very easy to use. I'd rank it as the equal of QuicKeys, the leading commercial macro program for OS X, if it had the scheduler function that QuicKeys has. HotApp is only $15. You can try it for free.
   A new Windows program I use daily might surprise you if you've ever wished you could create Adobe PDF (portable document format) documents of your own. PDFs are self contained text-and-image documents that have an almost magical quality: They look good no matter what they're viewed on, no matter what size they are shown or printed.
   The program is pdfMachine from BroadGun Software, at www.broadgun.com. It costs $49, but you can try it for free.
   PdfMachine works as if it were an additional printer. This means you can create a PDF from anything you can print -- from a Web page or a word processing document, for example, or from a group of images. I'm a huge fan of PDFs now that I can create them so easily. I made PDFs of Web pages often, for example. This lets me save them as a single document, print them out later with exceptional quality and view them on any size display without losing any definition.
   (A quick explanation: I use pdfMachine on my Windows 2000 PC. But my OS X computer is able to create PDFs automatically. It's built into the operating system of every Apple OS X computer.)
   An OS X program I can't praise enough is a simple application that creates image thumbnails. Apple's computers have long been ahead of Windows PCs in being able to show thumbnail-size versions of images stored in your folders, but Apple left out any automatic method of creating them when it released OS X. A free program called Pic2Icon fixes that omission.
   Pic2Icon, available free from www.sugarcubesoftware.com, lets you specify how the system thumbnails should look (choose the drop-shadow option, with full anti-aliasing for best quality) and will process an entire folder in one operation. Simply drop the folder onto a special "well" in the program window.
   (A tip: Change the setup of your image folders so that OS X is displaying the largest possible icon size. This makes the thumbnails big and gorgeous. Press Command-J to access the settings in a folder window.)